The Bloody Wallpaper

This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London, a piece of paid content available to subscribers when it came out but now only available through individual purchase.

In this exceptional story, you are invited to the most popular gala of the season! Well, invited is a strong term. More like being compelled to be there. As a servant. In a hotel built of literal nightmares.

Unlike many other exceptional stories, this one is very long and also location-based: you work on a hotel with 5 or 6 floors, each with their own rooms and tenants, and their own deck (fallen london features a randomized deck of encounters). There is also inventory management: as a servant, you must carry laundry to the basement to be washed, and then return it; go to the kitchen to order food, pick it up, and deliver it; and fetch items.

This provides for a sense of mundane drudgery, but that's contrasted by both the setting (all the tenants are horrific cosmic horror entities, vicious powerbrokers, or hapless victims, and reality and your mind warp around you) and by the text (Chandler Groover explained in a blog post how every bit of text that might seem repeated is actually written fresh, so while the actions are repetitive the text never is).

It also plays around with Fallen London mechanics, using up way more actions than a usual Exceptional Story but 'paying' you in a variety of objects you can pick up around the place, and using unusual 0-cost actions for the finale. Your Nightmares score, something you usually try very hard to get less than 8 (because it usually sends you to this very hotel) rockets to 14, 18, and much much higher. The 'unaccountably peckish' attribute, something that usually must be deeply avoided (it spawns black cards in your deck that are unavoidable and set you on a quest to permanently delete your character) is played with here in a way that felt cool.

It has extensive lore connections, primarily to anything involving dreams.

Many people rank this as the best Exceptional Story. I think there is no clear superior to it; other Chandler Groover stories and the ever-popular orphan story HOJOTOHO have their own positive features that make them competitive.

Edit: I like this comment from Fallen London discord:
"I know so many folks have praised Bloody Wallpaper's themes and setting, but the thing that stuck out to me most about it on top of those hideous joys is the way it plays like an old school parser IF. I thought it really managed to capture the tone and playstyle of a totally different format, and that was such a pleasure"